Shades
by FRC Coazze
Summary: A series of flash-fics about Severus Snape. There are so many emotions to describe this man, and so many things he does not know about himself.
1. Hope

_To anyone who has read this story before, yes: I've changed its settings. No more colours but emotions. This first flash-fic, anyway, it's the same as it was, I've just changed the title from "Green" to "Hope"._

_I've made this changing because the colours did not inspire me very much, and I've found other stories based on the same things so it would not be very original. I think emotions are not very original too, but they are more inspiring to me :D_

_I don't own Harry Potter and I'm not a native English speaker._

_Enjoy!_

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**Hope**

Albus Dumbledore looked at the man collapsed on the chair in front of him. He watched him in silence, caressing the figure with his blue eyes, but not in an arrogant attempt of reading the words written inside the man: it was a gentle passage of fresh, quiet water – a light touch, as if unwilling to disturb. Waiting.

He saw, he heard the man sighing heavily, his black eyes moved up to him, full of deep despair.

The man did not speak. He only looked at him, for a long moment – maybe he was not even the object of his gaze. A pair of eyes lost in a cold, inescapable surrender. The abandonment to a cold, useless life and, above all, without any glimmer of happiness.

Dumbledore saw the emptiness in those eyes, by that time lacking of something to look at. Someone to turn to...

He did not want to talk. He wanted the boy to give voice to the truth he already could see clearly. And the young man, in fact, after another long sigh – still looking at the vacuum over the headmaster's shoulder – said: "What shall I do now?"

Albus could not help but smile, impressed and touched by the tone of an abandoned child that the boy had used.

"Ah, Severus, that depends on you." And saying so, he joined the tips of the long fingers.

The young man shook his head, almost feeling teased by those words.

"There is nothing for me." He whispered.

Dumbledore peered at him over his half-moon spectacles at the same moment when Severus looked down at the stone floor.

"Have you ever heard of hope?" The headmaster asked with a smile.

"Hope." A bitter smile appeared on the boy's lips. "Hope is for fools. For those who are under the illusion that the future can be better."

Dumbledore looked at him gently. "There's always hope, Severus. Always. For fools as for wise. Moreover, it usually manifests itself to the latter. Wise is the fool who hopes."

Severus looked at him sceptically. In his heart, he hoped that the headmaster was right, that there was still hope for him. His mind, however, contradicted his heart's words. What future could there be for a Death Eater? Yet he felt his heart beat strenuously searching for the truth in Dumbledore's words.

As if he had caught the doubts of young man, Albus leaned forward, his blue eyes sparkling. "You see, Severus," he said softly, "your heart can still hope. Quieten it down would be a shame." He smiled. "Let your wisdom guide you to foolishness, my boy, so you can keep me company."


	2. Abandon

_New chapter!_

_As I've wrote in the introduction to the previous chapter, I've changed the settings of this series of flash-fics: no more colours but emotions... or whatever they are :D_

_Well, hope you enjoy this new little chapter! It is quite sad, I warn you ;)_

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**Abandon**

Arguing. They were always arguing and he was tired of that constant yelling, tired of the emptiness around him were only cries hovered. His corner was just a shelter for tears; grey, cold, ironically, the only ones who dared to caress his cheeks. But they did not bring him any consolation. No. Any consolation. Were they there to comfort him? Were they there to give him what the hand of a mother had never given? What were those tears? Was he really crying, or in the deepness of his desire for consolation he was simply imagining, in that sick, insane desire for something, anything — even burning droplets — to replace a caress that he would never receive?

What can a child know about those things? What a child believes the tears are? Sign of pain, any of the boys at Hogwarts for the first year would answer, a child cries when he is hurt. A child cries when someone says something bad or his parents scold him. A normal child would answer that way. But he probably had been the only child to come to a point when he had to look for tears; or the only child to whom crying meant to call those little grey fairies that would have given him some caress.

How miserable can be such a creature?

How still miserable was that search for affection or approval whining like a kid in his heart? You should learn, right? When your own tears will dry you should have understood how silly was whatever you were crying for. When you're an adult, the things that made you cried when you were a child should only be like distant echoes as absurd as childish.

Yet, he hated to admit it, but he had cried for a long time. He was still crying and for those same silly reasons from when he was a child: looking for someone close to console him. Oh, it was not a real crying anymore. He had learned to hide those tears, to hide them well, so well that they did not even leave his eyes. It was that imaginary weeping that had overwhelmed the real tears. Now, as then, he imagined to cry, searching the tears down within himself and envisaging them rolling down his cheeks, stroking his skin like the act of a mother. But not one ever left his black eyes.

He did not know if it was a real inability to weep, or a deep desire to deny those same tears he longed for, for shame or weakness. For years, not a single tear had left his eyes. Everything had become an inexorable vortex struggling inside and only inside him, where the tears merged with the blood and cleaned it, where their caresses soothed his wounds, while outside none evidence of that earthquake was showed.

His tears were inside him. Imaginary but true. If that child had any idea of the man who would become, he would have lost the ability to cry. He would not feel any pain, but only disgust and tears do not know erase hatred or loathing, in truth, they escape those feelings and thus they had never really been of any help to him. No real help, just what imaginary caresses could bring.

The grey fairies soothe the pain and heal the wounds, but do not erase anger and hatred. Not those, at least, addressed to themselves.

The years had passed. The pain had joined the awareness that what he longed for he could never have. Now, as he looked at the black sky, he began to understand. The tears he imagined did not exist.

Deep down, however, perhaps that man was not so different from that boy. Because in the heart of an empty man there was indeed a crying child.


End file.
